Kerri Power on the nature of real kindness.
It started on a hike in the Adirondacks, during a summer without rain. The streams marked on our map were all dried up. Dave and I hiked for hours in the July heat, and the arguing got worse as our water got low.
“We’re not going to have enough for the whole day,” I said.
“Sure we will.”
I stopped in a dry stream bed near a cluster of pines, and drained the dregs from my water bottle. The sun overhead shone directly in my eyes. “Dave, we have to get to the road and find somewhere to refill our bottles.”
Dave waited ahead on the trail, frowning at his map. Strands of sandy hair stuck to his damp forehead. “No, we’re fine. Look, there’s another stream two miles ahead.”
“But the last four have been dry. What if they’re all dry?”
He looked up from the map and flashed his blue-eyed smile, the one that had charmed me so quickly when we first met. “Come on, I wanted to do three more peaks today. It’s not so far.”
“That’s crazy. Please, can we just stop and find water? ”
“I don’t want to stop now. You really can’t do this?”
“No one can hike all day without water!
We argued for several minutes. My head buzzed from the heat. I was exhausted from struggling like this over the simplest choices. Over the past two years our relationship had been punctuated by fights in which I became exasperated by his immovability, and my own anger at not feeling heard. If only he could be more loving, give me what I needed, then everything would be okay.
Two years before, when I moved to New York from Canada, I thought I was a pretty kind person. I held doors, smiled at strangers. I was from St. John’s after all, where the bank teller you saw twice a year asked with heartfelt concern about your family and called you “ducky.”
About two months after I arrived in the city, a well dressed man approached me in the subway station at Times Square and asked for directions to the 1-9 line, then decided to follow me home.
“You’re going the wrong way,” I told him. “Your train is up those stairs.”
“I want to come with you.”
I walked around the subway station for five minutes trying to shake him, not wanting him to know which train I was getting on, let alone get on it with me. “No one smiles in this city,” he said, following me up a flight of stairs. He was a computer programmer living way out on Staten Island, and he was lonely. My smile had reminded him of someone.
I wasn’t truly afraid – it was broad daylight after all, and people were passing us everywhere. He wasn’t acting threatening, just oddly enamored.
“You’re so pretty, you must be Polish.”
“You have to go back, this isn’t your platform.”
We walked round and round, and finally I hopped on a train, I didn’t even look to see if it was the right one, hoping to put an end to it. He was right at my heels. “Here’s my business card,” he said. “You see, I’ve got my own business.”
The train was about to leave – we stood in the open doorway. Around us, people stood or sat in the subway car, wrapped in their own worlds. My heart was pounding. In a few seconds I would be traveling with this man, and then what?
“You have to get off!” I said. I put my hand on his chest and shoved him backwards, so that he had to step off the train to keep his balance. In a moment of divine timing, the double doors closed between us. I remember his open mouth, the look on his face as the train pulled away.
Most women in New York can tell similar stories of low-level threat, not always with such a benign ending. With so many people rubbing up against each other, every so often you end up on the radar of someone whose loneliness has nudged them past the boundaries of courtesy and reason. My roommate, a gregarious Greek-Canadian girl who had come to New York with the same internship program that brought me, was also followed on the subway in those early months. But in her case it happened at night and ended with the man holding her in a bear hug in the dark, three blocks from our apartment. “If you don’t let go, I’m going to scream!” she told him.
But he just held her closer. “All I can hear is the beating of my heart,” he said.
After several minutes of pleading she finally managed to break free and walked away, fast, without looking back. When she got to our apartment she was pale and shaking, her voice a whisper.
When I refused to go on, Dave and I walked steaming out of the woods. We found a road marked on our map, and walked almost directly into an entrance gate of tall white columns. The columns were topped with a red sloped roof inscribed with lettering I didn’t recognize. Beyond, a clean white building with beautiful red trim sat amid sloping fields of green grass and trees.
We wandered into the building and found several people scattered around a rambling kitchen and living area. As Dave went to find help, I watched the men and women talking and reading, washing dishes, preparing food together. Everyone spoke in low, calm voices.
Dave found a young man with a goatee who agreed to drive us back to our car at the trail head.
“What is this place?” I asked him.
“It’s a Buddhist monastery. They give teachings here.”
We followed him outside, and I looked back at the white walls, the yellow shutters. Warmth radiated through my body. I felt like someone had implanted a small, softly vibrating button in the middle of my chest. It was the most peaceful I’d felt in a long time.
In those days I worked as a website manager at the United Nations. The organizations I worked for were created with the noblest of intentions – reducing the poverty and violence faced by women in developing countries. By their nature, they were staffed almost completely by women. They came from around the world – India, Kenya, Algeria, Lebanon, Brazil. Many had been leaders of women’s movements in their own countries or were scholars in gender studies. Some had risen from poverty or escaped child marriages. They were passionate women with a worthwhile cause.
But there was a gap between the intention to do good, and the actual doing of it. One of the directors I worked under, a brilliant activist from Southeast Asia, moved through the office like a sharpened knife, brutally cutting down those whose efforts she found lacking, or who failed to rise to her level of vision. Once I overheard her condemning my boss, a warm-hearted American woman who was devoted to her. “She has absolutely no imagination,” the director scoffed to another woman, after my boss had left the room.
In another organization, an academic from Turkey presided over an office of women who seemed to despise her and each other. Staff meetings were silent warfare, with the director speaking at length to a roomful of toxic stares, then being cut to shreds once she left the room.
“These people have hated each other since they were born,” my colleague Maria said once.
At the end of each day, I felt emotionally exhausted. My office friends and I joked that we were working to advance the human rights of women everywhere – except here in this office. My fellow intern, Ellen, was a smart, earnest girl from Ontario who planned to start her PhD the following year. She was excited to be working for the executive office, but was soon heartbroken to find that the director ignored her in meetings, and was nearly impossible to please.
One lunch hour that winter, Ellen and I crossed 1st Avenue and climbed the stairs that led to the UN sculpture park bordering the East River. The director had declined Ellen’s request to write a reference letter. As we stood by the railing looking toward the river, cars whizzing past us on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive below, Ellen talked and cried. She wiped her cheek with her mitten, and tears slid over the woolen fibers like ice crystals.
Part of me wanted to hug her, but I held back. I offered a few words, tried to be comforting. I knew how hard Ellen had tried to make her internship work. But I also felt a space between us that I didn’t know how to bridge, a reticence to really offer her my heartfelt compassion. And also a kind of cool superiority, that no matter what happened, I wouldn’t let myself fall apart like that.
After the Adirondacks hike, I began to read books on Buddhism. I returned to the monastery to attend a beginner’s meditation retreat, and even sat for my own shaky daily meditations. Bit by bit, I became more aware of my anxious thoughts and the hold they had on me.
I realized that Dave and I had drifted into a stalemate—each of us waiting for the other to make a move, each unwilling to be first to offer the love that was needed. One night, after Dave spoke harshly to me in front of friends, I said to him, “You’re not kind to me.” He stared at me, baffled.
We lived in a four-story apartment building in Queens with a mix of old and young tenants. The oldest were Max and Selma, both ninety-two. What I remember is the smallness of them in the hallway, the way they clung to each other like leaves on a winter tree. Selma’s eyes were big with some long-held fear.
We barely noticed them in our self-absorbed comings and goings, hauling groceries and laundry bags and bicycles. I don’t think we even talked about them, except to marvel at the low rent they must have paid, with rent control keeping rates down until a tenant moved.
Early one Sunday our buzzer rang – a loud metallic crunch that started my heart racing, as buzzers and telephones so often do. Dave answered, and it was Selma in her robe, her wispy hair wild. Max had fallen out of bed. Could we help?
Their apartment was dark and cluttered. Against one wall a stack of yellow newspapers curled under the weight of two umbrellas and a walking stick. A line of ceramic dogs gazed up from a glass cabinet, each perky nose holding a layer of dust. A crusty rubber hairbrush sat on stacks of opened mail.
I followed dusty blue carpet to the bedroom, where the air was parched from the radiators. Max lay on his side by the bed, legs and arms out straight like a doll. He was a small man, but so stiff that Dave couldn’t lift him. His eyes were closed and he pulled in each breath painfully, followed by a quick deflation. Selma darted around the room in her nightgown, terrified and ineffectual. We asked questions – when, for how long – but got no real answers. It was like she remembered nothing before ringing our buzzer.
When I bent over Max and touched his hand, I smelled the stale sweetness of urine. His lips were shrunken without his false teeth, and downy fuzz covered his upper lip, stained brown in one spot. I called his name and he opened his eyes. “Don’t rush into calling a doctor,” he rasped. They were the only words he spoke.
We waited for the ambulance, and Max became still. His skin took on the yellow smoothness of wax.
I mouthed to Dave, “I think he’s dead.”
Dave stared hard. “No, he’s still breathing.”
We busied Selma making tea, though for who I didn’t know. When the paramedics came, their big outdoor bodies crowding the doorway, Selma began to grasp the reality of the situation.
“No, never mind,” she said, waving them away. “He’s just tired, you can all go.”
“Selma, he has to go to the hospital,” I said.
“He just needs to rest. We’ll be fine. We’ve always been fine.”
The paramedics – three or four young guys who had probably been up all night – lost patience fast. A short one with Nicholas Cage eyes spoke with flatness in his voice. “Look, lady, you called us, now we’re required to take him.” Selma was quiet. “We’re legally required. You’ve got no rights, lady.”
Selma stood frozen by the bed. I felt a terrible pressure to make things right. I saw that she was losing something, more than having her husband forcibly taken from her. Old and alone, her person-hood was starting to disappear.
“What if I go with you?”
As soon as I said it, I felt myself withdrawing from the offer. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go back to my apartment, crawl into bed and take refuge from my job and my relationship.
The paramedics waited, indifferent. For them, I was just a minor player in this scene. But Selma looked at me with something like hope. Dave disappeared back into our apartment, and I rode with Selma and Max in the ambulance.
At the hospital, Max was wheeled through a set of double doors. As we sat in the waiting room, I felt Selma attach to me with the tenacity of a child.
“You’ll stay, won’t you?” she said.
Her closeted smell of faint perfume, combined with the scent of hospital disinfectant, made it hard to breathe. I began to feel as if a cloth was pressed against my face. An hour passed, then two. Selma kept her hand on my arm. I kept checking my watch. “Are you sure you don’t want me to call someone, some friend or relative?”
It became clear that there was no one to call. Would I need to stay with her for the whole day? What if there was no one else? Would she need me to take care of her until Max recovered? If he recovered?
Across from me, a young woman with smooth dark skin and hair like strands of raspberry yarn held a wriggly boy in her lap. She balanced him with one arm and looked at me. The huge round clock over the double doors said 11:30.
I started to fear that my whole day would be lost, that I would return tomorrow to the cycle of stress at work without a pause in between. At the same time, Selma’s helplessness, her disconnection from anyone who cared for her, frightened me. For some reason, I couldn’t separate myself from it – pull back and say, “This I give, but not that.” Perhaps I was too young and too worn out, but I didn’t know what was reasonable, where my boundaries were. After three hours, I felt that I couldn’t breathe any longer. It was leave or suffocate.
“Ohhh….” Selma’s face fell when I told her I was going home.
“I think they’ve got someone coming to stay with you,” I said. My throat felt tight and small.
As I left the waiting room, a tall young man in a nurse’s uniform approached Selma. I saw the energy that she had fixed on me turn to him, saw hope light up her eyes as she looked into his face. I felt a moment of pained relief.
But minutes later in the cab I felt empty. This woman had needed my help, and I just couldn’t do it. Instead I was overwhelmed by fear. Back at the apartment, Dave sat at his computer in the bedroom. I paused in the doorway, watching the back of his head as he typed. Then I walked on, went to the living room and curled up on the couch.
I sensed that I had failed a cosmic test, and had only just realized I was being tested. Got it yet? Nope? OK, you’ll keep learning it until you do.
Years after New York, at a bus stop in Ottawa, I witnessed the simplicity of kindness in action. It was a cool Sunday morning in early fall, and ironically I was on my way to a Buddhist lecture (kindness has always been far too intellectual an exercise for me).
A girl, around 20, slouched on a bench in the bus shelter. There was something about her rumpled clothes, the way she propped her elbow against the Plexiglas wall and faced away from the direction of the bus, that made me think she’d been there for hours, maybe all night.
A woman in sweats and pink flip flops approached and read the schedule posted on a silver pole. “Bus coming in two minutes,” she told me. I nodded.
She took a cigarette out of her purse.
“Can I have one of those?” said the girl.
The woman gave her the cigarette and lit it. She looked down at her, exhaling a cloud from her own cigarette. “Are you all right?”
It was a simple question. But it amazed me. I had stood timidly outside the shelter, watching the girl out of the corner of my eye, thinking that if I approached her, she might want cash, or food, or maybe for me to take care of her until the end of time.
The girl muttered a few words, and they seemed to reach some quick understanding. I heard the word “shelter,” then the woman borrowed my pen to write down a phone number, which she handed to the girl. The bus came, and the two of us got on. The girl stayed behind.
I marveled at this woman. I snuck glances at her on the bus – her grey sweats, the plastic shoes. Where did it come from, this ability to give so naturally, and with a clear sense of limits?
At the Buddhist center, instead of listening to the lecture, I kept thinking about the woman on the bus. I realized that she had something I didn’t have yet, something I hadn’t been able to offer to Selma, or to Dave. It was real kindness. Nothing fancy. Just responding to someone’s need with simplicity, without awe at your own charity, without expecting anything in return. In fact, without any sense of self at all.
A few months after the incident with Max and Selma, I had attended a public talk given by the Dalai Lama in Central Park. A huge crowd filled the park’s East Meadow in order to, according to the New York Times, “hear the spiritual leader of Tibet give a free lecture on leading a life of kindness and happiness.”
My cryptic notes from that day make me wonder how much I took from the experience. “Thank hard times and people who hurt you as teachers.” “Keep inner peace in face of hurt and negative energy.” “Develop confidence and inner strength.”
I still try, every day.